Thursday, April 10, 2014

Well, here I am, Thursday of my time in the MTC. I leave here on Tuesday for Cape Town. The time that I've been here has been crazy busy.

I'll start from the beginning, the flights were long, ridiculously longer than they had to be. The flight from Dallas to London was long and boring. Then the layover in London was way long. I wanted to kill myself. Twelve hours in the airport can seriously make somebody hate life. Yeah, that was me. Just before boarding the flight is when I met up with Elder Hallman from Germany. He and I came down to the MTC together. We made it here safely.

I have to tell you that before I got set apart, I had a thousand things running through my head, and even still after I got set apart into Tuesday. However at the airport, after I had said goodbye to everybody and was walking away, I was just filled with peace and my mind was empty. My mind stayed empty and I felt that peace all the way till I got to London. There in London, I kinda joked to myself in my head that they messed up my baggage. Well, I got to the airport here in Johannesburg, and sure enough, my bag was still in London, they had no record of it ever making it down to Jo-burg. So for the first week, I was wearing only two pairs of clothing. I had a pair on, and the other pair was in the wash. It all worked out in the end.

My companions are Elder M. from Zimbabwe, and Elder R. from Madagascar. I can now say that I know more Malagasy than Nate does. It has been a chalange to work with him just because he doesn't speak english very well, but it has been rewarding for him to get more confident with what little he does and to be able to share the gospel as much as he can.

In answer to your question, yes, we did get to watch conference this past weekend. We were able to watch the Saturday morning session live (at 6pm here), then we went to bed, afterwards. Sunday, we had sacrament meeting and then started conference again. We watched then watched Saturday PM and then priesthood, and then were able to able to watch Sunday AM live. We saw Sunday PM on Tuesday night following our trip to the temple. Conference was awesome! What a blessing it is to have that much inspiration in our lives right now.

The temple on Tuesday was awesome! Out of the 21 of us here, only three of us had been to the temple previously. It was fun to be an escort for three or four elders at one time.

Other than that, the MTC has been crazy busy, we wake up at 6:30 each day, eat at 7, then study from 7:30 to 8:30, then classes and teaching till 12:30, more classes from 1:30 to 5, then more teaching till 9, then planning, prepping for the next day, laundry and then prayers and off to bed. Every day, I want some down time, just a little to catch up. There is so much being taught. Tell Nate that the biggest thing that we are learning about is about HOW to teach, not the lessons. But it does help to know the lesson plans.

So yeah, the MTC is crazy. Next time I will write to you will be when I'm in the field.
The pictures that I attached are something like follows: